He has denied wrongdoing but said on Wednesday that he did not want to be an obstacle to the country’s development.

Party leaders in Congress later agreed to accept President Kuczynski’s resignation. He had been facing an impeachment vote on Thursday.

Pressure has been growing after footage emerged of his allies offering opposition politicians financial rewards if they backed him in the vote.

Is he gone for good now?
Congress still has to vote on whether to accept President Kuczynski’s resignation. Lawmakers will meet on Thursday to discuss the issue and are expected to put it to a vote later on Thursday or Friday.
. . .
Mr Kuczynski has already been through one impeachment vote. In December, his opponents wanted to remove him for allegedly receiving illegal payments from the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht.

– President Donald Trump met with a group of Latin American leaders Monday
– He said the Venezuelan government was ‘collapsing’ and the people were ‘starving’
– He said the U.S. was prepared to take ‘further action’ if the Maduro administration persisted in imposing ‘authoritarian rule’
– He called the situation ‘completely unacceptable’
– Trump said in August there was a ‘possible military option’ for Venezuela

To put PDVSA’s depletion rate into perspective, let’s compare it to Exxon’s. At the end of 2015, Exxon’s depletion rate was 8.15% — which is comparable to most of the world’s major oil companies. That rate implies Exxon’s median time to extraction (and sale) for a barrel of oil is 8.2 years. That’s 190 years earlier than PDVSA would realize revenue from selling a barrel of oil. Given the rate at which Exxon is depleting its reserves, they are worth something. Indeed, if we discount at 10%, Exxon’s reserves are worth 46% of the well-head value. Not zero, as is the case for PDVSA.

So, with the way PDVSA operates, it is exploiting reserves so slowly as to render them, on average, worthless. If that’s not bad enough, PDVSA is generating negative cash flows and piling up a mountain of debt (see the chart above). The arithmetic does not look good. PDVSA faces $10 bil. in interest and principal payments this year, but reports estimate that PDVSA only has $2 bil. in cash to service its debt obligations. In principle, the government could come to the rescue. But, its stated reserves have dwindled to below $10.5 bil.

Workers at Venezuelan steelmaker Sidor are planting sunflowers and vegetables on company premises to ease a national food deficit as steel output has almost ground to a halt nine years after the company was taken over by the government.

That’s according to the recent 2017 Index of Economic Freedom ranking, which places Venezuela in 179th position — next to North Korea, which occupies the 180th.

Published by the Heritage Foundation, the Economic Freedom report measures such things as trade freedom, business freedom, investment freedom, and the degree of property rights protection in 180 countries actually ranked.

Venezuela is also catching up with North Korea in corruption, while it is well ahead in inflation, which runs at 800%.

Mr. Kuczynski, a former Wall Street banker and ex-World Bank economist, came to discuss economic growth in the region and problematic hot spots such as Venezuela.
. . .
Peru has a free-trade agreement with the U.S., China, Canada and European Union, among others. It was also a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact from which Mr. Trump withdrew the U.S., and the Pacific Alliance, a four-member Latin American group that includes Mexico, Chile and Colombia.

Q. Your first foreign trip as president was to China. Are you looking to Asia for growth because Trump is threatening trade barriers?

A. China is our biggest market. It is about 22 percent of Peruvian exports — mostly metals but also some sophisticated agricultural products. We have no issues with China the way others may have with [its claims in the South China Sea].

Q. You are trying to get the Chinese to invest here?

A. The Chinese have two huge copper mines here. They are looking at several other projects.

Q. If the U.S. opts out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership , will China move in and ask TPP countries to join its own Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership?

A. Right. This is a group that will include India, which is important for us because India is the one country we don’t have a trade treaty with. The idea we floated during the recent meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is that the Pacific Alliance countries — that is Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile — join the Free Trade Agreement of Asia and the Pacific (FTAAP). Basically, the FTAAP is the APEC countries without the U.S.

TPP was more ambitious, but it also had its detractors. It didn’t include China, which is the bigger player in the Pacific. Also on pharmaceuticals, the period of tests would have gone from five to 10 years, which might have raised the cost of pharmaceuticals in countries like Peru. So there was some opposition to it. A lot of the business people here love TPP.

Q. How about yourself?

A. I don’t love TPP so much. China is our biggest customer. So how can we support something that excludes them?

IT COULD hardly have been closer. As the final votes were counted in the run-off ballot for Peru’s presidency, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a liberal economist, seemed to have defeated Keiko Fujimori by just 39,000 out of almost 18m votes, a margin of 0.2%. After months in which Ms Fujimori had led opinion polls, this was a surprising reversal. It shows how deeply divided Peru is about the legacy of Ms Fujimori’s father, Alberto, who ruled it as an autocrat from 1990 to 2000; he is serving long prison terms for corruption and complicity in human-rights abuses.

Kuczynski, a former World Bank executive and ex-prime minister of Peru who has also served as finance and energy ministers, ran for president the first time in 2011. He came in third in that race, behind Fujimori and current President Ollanta Humala. He had refused to renounce his American nationality, which had become a campaign issue.

Known as PPK, he has since renounced his American citizenship, although he is married to an American woman and his children live in the United States.

When confirmed by election officials, Mr. Kuczynski will take office for a five-year term on July 28, replacing President Ollanta Humala.

He has promised to boost economic growth by cutting taxes and increasing infrastructure spending. He has also said he would expand access to running water to some 10 million Peruvians without access to it in their homes, while curbing corruption and crime, a top concern.

Whoever wins Sunday’s runoff, Peru’s executive and legislative branches will have a very different relationship. Kuczynski, a political liberal whose allies hold only 18 of 130 seats, would have to negotiate an arrangement with Popular Force – a situation that could make Peru very difficult to govern. Although Fujimorismo’s economic program differs little from Kuczynski’s, its cooperation may require concessions in other areas — such as the pardon (or move to house arrest) of the disgraced Alberto Fujimori. And if the 77-year-old Kuczynski were to lose public support, as has each of his three predecessors, the Fujimorista majority could be tempted to remove him early.

Absentee ballots are arriving from Chile, the U.S., Spain and elsewhere. Receiving votes from remote communities, particularly those deep in Peru’s Amazon rain forest, has also taken time. And the counting of votes in a rugged and isolated coca-growing region, a hotbed for leftist rebels, was delayed by bad weather and security challenges, the election agency said Tuesday